How can students use the Visual Thesaurus to investigate chemical elements and their properties?  Continue reading...

I'm a big Langston Hughes fan; he had a gift for putting ideas into challenging yet embracing truths, and boy, was the man prolific. He wrote dozens of poems, plays, short stories and novels, many that are appropriate for a middle- and high-school-age classroom.  Continue reading...

My mention earlier this week of the word gerrymander (after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, blamed for the tortuous redistricting in his state in 1812) inspired some free association. One commenter posited a connection to the jerry of jerry-built ("shoddy; of inferior workmanship and materials"), though it turns out that word only shows up about half a century after Gerry first gerrymandered. Jerry-built, in turn, led another reader to wonder, "What about jerry-rigged? I've heard that it's really supposed to be jury-rigged."  Continue reading...

The trans-Atlantic words of the year have been selected on the Separated by a Common Language blog. Best American-to-British import is meh, and the best British-to-American import is vet (the verb). Read all about it here (and read our own discussion of meh here and vet here).

A few months ago, I ended up in Emergency for 15 hours. (Long story; it was nothing serious.) But the debacle caused me to miss a deadline. The client was the picture of understanding but for me, a former daily newspaper editor, it was deeply embarrassing.  Continue reading...

Every now and then, a prominent person achieves so much notoriety that his or her name enters the language as an eponym. Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry gave us gerrymander, after carving a salamander-shaped electoral district that favored his party in 1812. Major Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian officer who collaborated with the Germans during World War II, so quisling came to mean "a traitor to one's country." And when Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was quashed in 1987, it was said that he got Borked by his opponents. Now there are a couple of names in the news that just might lend themselves to new eponyms.  Continue reading...

Last week, Visual Thesaurus contributor and New York public school teacher Shannon Reed shared some experiences about the richness of student slang that she had encountered. Here is a counterpoint to Shannon's piece, from a new member of the VT sales staff, Elissa Seto. Before joining the VT team Elissa taught science at an urban middle school in the South Bronx. While a fan of slang, Elissa is also concerned about how student reliance on nonstandard speech may be symptomatic of what educators call the achievement gap.  Continue reading...